With the development of electronic information industry, the use of an active area is becoming more and more popular. For example, a user may use the active area to quickly obtain local business information in real-time. The active area refers to an area that has relatively flourishing business activities such as an area with at least one of the following characteristics: a large customer flow, a large visitor number, convenience for shopping, a large transacting amount, and a large number of stores. As the active area can provide a great degree of convenience for the user with respect to living, entertainment, and working, the user generally expects to obtain information about the active areas of a city when the user first arrives at the city.
The conventional techniques of searching the active area are usually determined by the personal experiences of user, personal recommendation, or any other manual methods.
For example, the active area of the city may be determined by an administrator of a server. Specifically, the administrator selects and names the active area according to local information and his/her understanding, such as Wulin Plaza and Hefang Street in Hangzhou City, Wangfujing and Guomao in Beijing City. Then the administrator uploads information of the determined active area to the server. Thereafter, when the user performs a search, the server determines a matched active area in accordance with a search condition, and returns the matched active area to the user. FIG. 1 illustrates a manually determined range of an active area of Sanlitun of Beijing City.
The conventional techniques have some disadvantages.
The method for manually determining the active area is restricted by personal experiences. As the standards and understandings of the active area vary with respect to different persons, the determined active area may be partial. In addition, with the rapid development of the Internet and expansion of the city, the active area may often change. The method for manually determining the active area would cause large workload and low efficiency and its accuracy and reliability are also questionable.
When the manually determined active area does not meet the requirements or the expectations of the user, the user is forced to input another keyword and the server then executes another search. Thus, the conventional techniques increase a number of times that the users visit the server, a number of search times at the server, and waste the resources and bandwidth of the server.